I am not from the US. Had my close relative fight with cancer. If not for the government which sponsored it almost fully, excluding a couple of procedures like PET, it would cost our family a lot. Just for the scale: pial for one infusion of one out of three drugs would cost us $8k and my relative would’ve needed 16 infusions.
In financial terms, for most people the government doesn’t help you at all[1]. Either your private health insurance pays some of the costs, or else you pay completely out of pocket. Even if you do have health insurance, it’s still going to cost you several thousand dollars per year until it’s resolved. It’s quite common for cancer to cause people to go bankrupt even with good health insurance.
If you’re 1) old or 2) through means testing are found to be both poor and physically unable to work, then you get government-funded a health insurance plan. You still might go bankrupt though, just as with private health insurance. ↩︎
They made a really good documentary about this a few years ago:
Are you asking about the specific course of treatment, which will verify by type and stage, or how people pay?
As for paying, the only national programs are Medicare (restricted by age) and Medicaid (restricted by income). The US veterans administration is a separate govt program for military veterans and I believe their families, too. Everyone else either has some level of insurance provided by their employer (which will still generally be terrible), or nothing at all.
The charts here are helpful https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6778988/
It looks like if a person is above the poverty line and is under 65 they will have to pay like 20% of the medical bill which could be insane, given they have an insurance. Otherwise most first line treatments are covered by Medicare and Medicaid Plan B.
So if a person earns, like not insane $3k/mo, they will most certainly be billed with enormous bills and be refused to be treated again in case of relapse, just because they haven’t paid the previous bill?
In addition, medical costs in the US are higher than many places, because the insurance companies don’t have to bargain with the whole nation at once. Even Medicare and Medicaid have historically been prevented by law from using their full bargaining power in some cases.
I don’t actually know what happens to medical coverage if you have medical debt. It will eventually go to collections and can be used to garnish your wages, I believe.
That’s really sad
If your country has a better system, it is because the unions and the left have fought for it. Don’t let the Macrons of the world do to you what Reagan did to us.
This cannot be screamed loud or often enough!
So there is also an out of pocket maximum which is the most you’ll pay in a calendar year no matter how much your expenses are which vary by insurance plans but in my experience have generally been between 5-15k with 15k being for much cheaper insurance and 5k being for better insurance so if you have 1m in medical expenses and copay would be 200k it would instead be just that max out of pocket of approximately 10k, which while not great is much more manageable. The unfortunate thing is that is tied to the year so if you start treatment in November and finish treatment in March that 10k per calendar year turns into 20k since it was over the course of 2 years
